Neighborhood insecurity and slums in Patna, India
Slums are often looked as breeding grounds for conflict, violence, and crime. However, a majority of slum dwellers are more often the victims, but they are viewed as criminals. Unfortunately, this perception also hinders urban administrators from adopting and implementing inclusive and effective policies to overcome urban insecurity and poverty.
Patna is the capital of Bihar, the third most populous and one of the poorest state in India. Due to continuously declining agricultural productivity and increased natural disaster occurrences, Patna has witnessed a huge rural to urban migration in the last two decades. However, without sustainable industries, urban planning, and public goods provisions, mass migration has led to an unsustainable, an unplanned, and a crowded city. The city has also not been able to attract investment and jobs, which adds to already existing problems of poverty, crime, and growing slums.
In my dissertation, I identified the origins of neighborhood insecurity by rethinking the relationships among slums, informality, and local governance. It combines the quantitative analysis based on the household survey that selected 225 households from 16 slums through multi-stage stratified random sampling, individual interviews and focuses group discussion between 2016 and 2017. It answers the core question in three-paper format.
In the first paper (Chapter 2), I quantitatively identified the determinants of neighborhood conflicts and violent resolution. It finds that the perception of infrastructure insufficiency rather than informality in terms of housing, employment, and infrastructure quality played a more significant role in arousing neighborhood conflicts. The qualitative analysis further justified the evaluated effect of self-governance in mitigating the neighborhood conflicts in regression models. (see poster)
The second paper focuses on the perception of insecurity and crime and their origin. It identifies the gender differences in perceiving insecurity and crimes and further evaluated the extent to which informality influenced their perceptions.
The final paper focuses on the dwellers’ opinions on neighborhood security and governmental actions by quantitative and qualitative analysis. It evaluates the impact of heterogeneity of communities and local governance on insecurity and violence. It will find the key to mitigate the distrust and conflicts between government and slum dwellers during slum upgrading and redevelopment.
This dissertation suggests that providing sufficient facilities according to the pressing needs at the household level could reduce conflicts immediately; while empowering the urban poor through civic education is effective mitigation in the long run. Providing pro-women facilities through empowering females in terms of community governance, political and economic opportunities could increase the perception of women’s security. To solve the mutual distrust between local government and slum dwellers rest on information sharing at the bottom and empowerment in the unplanned and deregulated sector in urban planning. The findings will facilitate effective policy-makings to make the city safer and socially resilient.
Want to know more about my fieldwork and research? please down PFD or the link below
